I commented on
this discussion on the
American Chemical Society's LinkedIn page, but I know LinkedIn posts don't stay up for long, so I thought I would preserve it here for posterity.
The post was about
this story from NPR, reporting on
a piece in Science about a sting to expose predatory journals.
Here's my comment:
"The fatal flaw of the spoof study was that it lacked a
negative control, but so too did this piece of stunt journalism.
Maybe he told too many coworkers about his
project to be able to send it to Science, but what about
Science Translational
Medicine,
Nature,
The Journal of Biological Chemistry, etc. etc.?
It's true that the rate of acceptance of the
spoof paper among open access journals was shockingly high, but if he's going
to make the claim that this is a problem with open access and not with publishing
in general, he really needs the traditional publisher control.
Any sort of argument that traditional
publishers don’t have the same financial incentives to publish bad papers as
open access journals that charge publication fees, and therefore are unlikely
to accept the spoof study, is cute, but is not science.
Besides, many subscription-based
publications, such as
The Journal of Biological Chemistry, also charge
publication fees, too, and have the same financial incentive to publish as many
papers as possible.
"Predatory journals are an important issue, and I’m glad he’s
raising awareness about it, but I’m not convinced this was the best way to do
it.
In particular, I’m puzzled as to why
he pretended to be from Africa.
He says
“
My hope was that using developing world authors and
institutions would arouse less suspicion if a curious editor were to find
nothing about them on the Internet”, but I thought the whole point was to
reveal that editors of some journals don’t even bother to do even the most
basic homework on the papers submitted.
By deliberately making the manuscript difficult to read, he undermines
his claim that “This sting did not waste the time of many legitimate peer
reviewers.” I fear that this sting could
very well erode trust in the scientific process, and might make Western
journals even more suspicious of papers submitted from developing countries,
simply because they are from developing countries."
